of Non-Aligned Nations was to meet in Baghdad in 1982, and he wanted the poor world’s prime ministers and presidents to look on the works of his new city – and despair. Like many a totalitarian leader before him, he had a craving for triumphal architecture. Unfortunately, most of Iraq’s architects were unavailable for work. After ludicrous show trials of alleged ‘economic saboteurs’, they were either dead or among the millions of refugees who had fled abroad.
Desperate to find alternative talent, Saddam’s officials wrote to Makiya Associates to tempt Mohamed into reshaping Baghdad. Saddam was prepared to forget about his part in the global scheme of British Freemasons against the Arab nation, they told him, and shower him with lucrative commissions. Mohamed was wary, but few architects can resist the chance to follow Christopher Wren and Baron Haussmann and stamp their mark on their capital. ‘My mother was the one who was interested in politics,’ Kanan told me. ‘My father went along with her, but all that really mattered to him was architecture. He was an architect to his bones. He wanted to build.’
The Baathists could not have been more attentive when the exile returned. They waved away the customs officers at Baghdad airport and treated Mohamed as a VIP. A member of the Revolutionary Command Council gave an unctuous speech on how proud Iraqis were of Mohamed’s achievements.
‘He was a very nice man,’ Mohamed recalled.
‘Later, they killed him.’
Makiya Associates’ willingness to build for Saddam provoked Kanan into a savage argument with his father. ‘This is for history,’ Mohamed snapped. ‘It’s not for the people there now. It’s got nothing to do with them – they’ll be gone. This is for the future.’
Kanan couldn’t stand it. He hated the thought that by working for Makiya Associates he was helping Saddam create his city of the future. The Iranian Afsaneh Najmabadi, who was his wife by 1979, needed a break, too. Her world had stopped making sense.
The West’s support for dictators convinced leftists of Kanan Makiya and Afsaneh Najmabadi’s generation that its democracy was a laughable fraud. Nowhere was the contrast between idealistic rhetoric and sordid politics clearer than in Najmabadi’s native Iran. At the bidding of Britain, America had overthrown Iran’s popular government because it had threatened to nationalize the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. The West installed Mohammad Reza Pahlavi as Shah of Iran and allowed him to reign as an autocrat whose love of grandiose uniforms and glittering medals would have been ridiculous had it not been combined with the cruel suppression of dissent.
To Kanan, Afsaneh and their friends it was natural to expect that an illegitimate monarch doing the bidding of the West would provoke a revolution. And in 1979 there was a revolution in Iran. It was as profound and shocking as the French and Russian revolutions. Its consequences were as far-reaching – you hear of them daily on the evening news. But it was a revolution of a kind the modern world had never seen. Instead of being led by workers demanding fair shares for all or middle-class radicals demanding human rights and democratic elections, Iran had an Islamist revolution led by priests determined to impose their god’s law on men and women (especially women).
Iranian leftists went along with them, somewhat stupidly as events were to turn out. Although they didn’t agree with the Ayatollah Khomeini’s belief that everything the human race needed to know was revealed in a seventh-century holy book, they reasoned that any revolution was better than none. The mania for Islam would pass, they thought. Religious exuberance was just a craze that flared up every now and again, then disappeared. All serious people knew that religion was hardly worth thinking about. Once the priests had discredited themselves, the scales would fall from the eyes of the masses and they would turn to the true faith of socialism. Everything the Left thought it knew stopped it from understanding that their socialism was dying, while militant religion was taking its place. Kanan stayed in London and watched from afar, but Afsaneh Najmabadi went back to fight with her comrades for a new Iran. The leaders of the Iranian left assured them that they could safely ignore the black-clad fanatics who were fanning out across the country. ‘We have criticised Islamic fanaticism – we are against the non-progressive ideas of the conservative elements,’ said Noureddin Kianouri, leader of the Marxist Tudeh Party, as he explained how he had weighted the options. ‘But for us, the positive side of Ayatollah Khomeini is so important that the so-called negative side means nothing.’
Later they arrested him along with tens of thousands of his comrades, paralysed his arms, broke his fingers and made him confess on television to being a Soviet spy. The ayatollahs crushed the Left, the liberals and the feminists, and imposed a religious tyranny far more terrible and far harder for women to endure than the Shah’s persecutions.
Afsaneh Najmabadi had been far more sceptical about the wisdom of leftists going along with holy misogynists, and had the good sense to leave and get back to Kanan in London. The news from Iran got no better on her return. In 1980 Saddam Hussein took advantage of the revolutionary chaos and began an unprovoked war to grab what Iranian oil fields he could. It turned into the longest conventional war of the twentieth century. Across trenches reminiscent of Passchendaele, the Ayatollah Khomeini sent wave after wave of martyrs. Young men marched towards the Iraqi guns, apparently welcoming the chance of death and admission to paradise and all its gorgeous virgins. With tactics again reminiscent of Passchendaele, Saddam met them with poison gas.
The strains in the Makiya family were becoming intolerable. By working in his father’s London office on the plans for Saddam’s new capital, Kanan was by extension working for a fascistic dictator, who had launched a war of imperial aggression. His wife was seeing her hopes for a socialist Iran destroyed by reactionary clerical forces, while being reminded every morning that her husband was going to work for the tyrant of Iraq whose armies were slaughtering her fellow Iranians.
Something had to give, and to her relief Kanan resigned from Makiya Associates and determined to piece together what had happened to Iraq by talking to refugees.
London is the place to find them. Constables from the Metropolitan Police hear slogans in strange tongues when they shepherd demonstrators through the streets. City bankers who think themselves men of the world would hear stories to make them shudder if they bothered to talk to the migrant women who clean their floors. The scruffy pedant, who insists on dragging out a wearisome meeting at the London School of Economics, becomes a new head of a new state. The preacher in the inner-city mosque with the fancy-dress beard and hook for a hand seems a post-modern parody until the police arrest him for inciting terrorism.
London is a city of exiles: pay attention and you will hear the woes of the world.
‘The truth is that before 1980 Kanan hadn’t been all that involved in Iraq,’ Afsaneh Najmabadi told Weschler. ‘Lebanon and Palestine and, later, Iran were far to the fore in what we were struggling over. But then it was as if the Baath came to him. If his father had not been invited back to Iraq, Kanan would probably never have written that book. It was him being involved, even tangentially, in designing the Baath Party headquarters that actually got him thinking, seriously thinking about the Baath … There is a great irony here.’
Ms Najmabadi didn’t know it, but ‘ironic’ wouldn’t begin to cover the course of the next twenty-five years.
As an aperitif, the money Saddam Hussein was paying his father gave Kanan the time and space to ask very good and very simple questions: What do the Baathists believe? Where do they come from? Why do they kill so many people?
A private income aside, Kanan had one other advantage. He slowly grasped a truth about totalitarianism that Albert Camus, George Orwell, Hannah Arendt and Robert Conquest had grasped before him: the terror isn’t a side effect of the system; the terror is the system. Once a political or religious totalitarian movement has momentum, it has an irrational life and logic of its own which can’t be explained away. It kills because its ideology says it has to kill. The massacres will be worthwhile because when it exterminates the enemies of the proletariat or the master race or the one true religion, all the conflicts of the human condition will be resolved in an earthly paradise.
Because